Her tone was unmistakable. I know that tone. It's the tone she strikes when she asks, "Is that what you're wearing tonight?"

I cleared my throat and prepared to make my stand. We had been married only a few weeks and were just now getting to the business of moving in together. It was important to be firm.

"Ummmm," I said. "Well . . ."

The pile of boxes in my office--a snug sun porch--bore silent witness to the truth. My office would never hold my sports library. I don't know how many sports books I have. A lot. Lined up spine to spine, the books on college football alone would cover three yards and a cloud of dust motes.

So some of the sports books were going to have to commingle with the real books out in the dining room-cum-library. We call it that because the room is large enough to conduct batting practice and because our books outnumber our dinner guests by about 100 to 1.

Assessing the situation, my wife immediately went into damage-control mode. She offered only one plea: no spiral bindings in public view.

OK. That meant the media guides would stay in the office.

But what about the rest?

We apparently weren't the first couple to engage in a biblioquibble. In "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," Anne Fadiman describes her attempt to merge her library with her husband's after five years of marriage.

"Promising to love each other for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health--even promising to forsake all others--had been no problem, but it was a good thing the Book of Common Prayer didn't say anything about marrying our libraries and throwing out the duplicates," Fadiman wrote. "That would have been a far more solemn vow, one that would probably have caused the wedding to grind to a mortifying halt."

I knew what Fadiman meant. You want mortifying? John Updike may have produced the finest piece of writing on Ted Williams ("Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu"), but to consign Updike to a space on the same shelves as George Perles . . . that's mortifying.

It looked as if Perles' 1995 autobiography, "The Ride of a Lifetime," would have to stay in the office.

Suddenly I knew how coaches feel on cutdown day.

The majority of my books would be summoned at dawn with a finger on their bindings, the book turk telling each outcast edition to report to the coach immediately. And bring your playbook, son.

Decisions, decisions. Where should I put my 1917 edition of "Second Base Sloan" by Christy Mathewson? And what about "Bury Me in an Old Press Box," a 1957 memoir by Fred Russell, then sports editor of the Nashville Banner?

Both wound up in the dining room. But I decided to keep The Baseball Encyclopedia at hand--not because I cover baseball, but because every time I gaze upon its lovely maroon cover, it reminds me how thankful I am that I don't cover baseball anymore.

A college football writer by trade, I gave priority to volumes devoted to the campus game. Notre Dame has the heaviest representation in my collection (13 books, including two titled "Shake Down the Thunder," one with an exclamation point, one without). Someday I'd like someone to explain how a team with so many all-but-illiterate followers could be the subject of so many books.

I hope that doesn't ring snobbish, for there is no elitism attached to this hobby. For starters, even the term "sports book" is misleading. If I mention my passion for sports books, odds are someone will respond, "Do you prefer Bally's or Caesars Palace?"

And me a non-gambler.

I'm never going to impress anyone by announcing that I own a signed copy of Joe Falls' autobiography. In fact, when I mentioned this to the author himself in the Michigan Stadium press box last autumn, he frowned and looked anxiously over my shoulder, as if he were wishing that security guards would materialize and lead this obviously insane man away.

George Orwell said that if he had learned anything in his time as a bookstore employee, it was that one cannot possibly discuss books without grossly overpraising most of them.

Orwell should have seen my sports books.

"Leadership Lessons from Bill Snyder," a quickie book published to cash in on Kansas State's rapidly rising football fortunes, might be the worst book by a sports figure I have ever read. But you'd need to be stronger than Ezra Dean, the Blue Cut slugger who owned the single-season home-run record in W.P. Kinsella's "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy," to pry it away from me.

I'm a junkie, too far gone for any 12-step program. I favor the two-step approach: See book. Buy book.

Sometimes I even take a third step: Read book.

For years I've bugged the Tribune's sports editors to run a weekly book review in this section. I've graciously offered to chip in a review or two; I can think of few causes more noble than improving the reading habits of Chicago sports fans.